Now, as the oceans are undergoing a historic shift in chemistry, the lab is establishing itself as a place to study what that will mean for marine life. And the 91爆料 laboratory is uniquely placed in naturally acidic waters that may be some of the first pushed over the edge by human-generated carbon emissions.

A published last month in Limnology and Oceanography tracks about two years of weekly pH data in Puget Sound, collected since the 91爆料 established a facility there to study the effects of ocean acidification.

Researchers found typical values of dissolved carbon dioxide, or CO2, in Puget Sound are more than 650 parts per million, higher than even the threshold that Earth’s atmosphere crossed last year for the first time in modern humans’ existence. In other words, Puget Sound’s water is already higher in the gas than our CO2-choked atmosphere.

Measurements off the dock show that the water surrounding the lab has an average pH of about 7.8, which is acidic for seawater. Worldwide, average ocean pH is thought to have dropped from about 8.2 to 8.1 due to climate change.

“People have being going to Friday Harbor Labs to study the biology for 100 years, and they didn’t really realize until we started doing these analyses that it would be a good place to try to study adaptation,” said lead author , a professor in the 91爆料 School of Oceanography. “The CO2 levels have been high for a long time, so everything that lives up there must be extremely well adapted.”

Increased carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels can be blamed for 13 to 22 percent of the unusual acidity in Puget Sound, the new paper concludes. The rest is because of ocean currents that have made our waters naturally rich in nutrients, low in oxygen, and low in pH since long before the era of climate change.

The Friday Harbor Labs’ was established in 2011 and includes facilities where undergraduates, graduate students and researchers from the 91爆料 and elsewhere can monitor pH levels and mimic future changes in ocean chemistry.

Murray, a chemical oceanographer, did calculations to trace the origin of water properties measured at the facility. He found that most water in the Sound is from the , a subsurface current that originates below a productive fishing area off the coast of Mexico and brings water that is high in nutrients and CO2, but low in oxygen and pH, north along the coast. When winds blow from the north off Washington’s coast, the water near the surface gets blown offshore, and this deeper water gushes up and into Puget Sound.

Murray looked at different dates for when components of that water were last at the surface 鈥� 25 years ago, 50 years ago or 100 years ago 鈥� and what atmospheric CO2 would have been at that time. Those helped give the 13 to 22 percent range for the fingerprint of human-driven acidification.

“This tells the story of ocean acidification in Puget Sound, where we have a complex set of processes making naturally acidic water even more so over time,” Murray said.

The pH levels off Friday Harbor’s dock spiked in May and June 2012. That was likely due to the third factor influencing ocean water acidity: a plankton bloom, when tiny marine plants’ photosynthesis used up CO2 and shifted the water toward higher, or more normal, pH.

Because pH is hard to measure and has only recently become a concern, little is known about the historic values, Murray said.

The 91爆料 is also working in a separate project with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to do along the entire West Coast and its protected bays. Those observations show that the low values in Puget Sound are widespread, and provide more detail about the seasonal and spatial patterns that cause pH values here to dip and spike.

“This series of data from a location in the San Juan Islands helps us interpret the oceanographic processes that are responsible for conditions in our region,” said , a 91爆料 professor of marine and environmental affairs and co-director of the 91爆料-based .

Co-authors are Cory Bantam, Mike Foy, Barbara Paul and Amanda Fay at the 91爆料; and Emily Roberts at 91爆料’s Friday Harbor Labs; Evan Howard at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and at the California Ocean Science Trust.

The research was funded by the Educational Foundation of America and the National Science Foundation.

###

For more information, contact Murray at 206-543-4730 or jmurray@uw.edu. Murray will be on travel from March 18 to 30.

For information about the 91爆料’s Ocean Acidification Environmental Laboratory at Friday Harbor Labs, contact manager Connie Sullivan at casull@uw.edu.

A 91爆料 class is using the nation’s first controlled-ocean research tool to study the effects of increased acidity on marine ecosystems.

“The goal is to study the impact of ocean acidification on biological community structure in seawater from the San Juan Islands,” said , a 91爆料 oceanography professor.

On the main dock at the 91爆料鈥檚 until April 29 the team will start at 8:30 each morning by lowering bottles six feet (two meters) into each reservoir to collect water samples. Students enrolled in a research apprenticeship class then analyze the seawater to see how acidity affects chemistry, bacterial communities, and marine animal and plant life.

“The biological impacts of ocean acidification are the big unknowns,” Murray said. “We know that CO₂ is going up, and we know that the oceans are going to be more acidic, but what we don’t know, and everyone is concerned about, is the possible impact on the biology.”

Murray led development of the experimental facility over the past five years with funding from the Educational Foundation of America and the National Science Foundation. In recent years the group has worked out some tweaks 鈥� adding floats to each reservoir to keep from straining the dock, and shading the covers to slow down biological blooms in the reservoirs.

This is the first spring that the reservoirs will be used to carry out experiments, launched April 9, to simulate more acidic oceans. Four faculty members, four technicians and two teaching assistants will help the students perform chemical tests, conduct microscope analyses and do simple genetic tests of biological diversity on the seawater.

The reservoirs, called mesocosms, are water enclosures that provide a controllable section of the natural ocean. They allow researchers to conduct studies that are midway between a controlled lab test and an open-ocean experiment.

The Friday Harbor structures are 18-foot-tall plastic bags that hang from metal rings. For two days seawater near the dock was coarsely filtered to remove jellyfish and other large pieces of marine life before gradually filling the bags. Each bag holds 3,000 liters (790 gallons), enough water to fill more than 35 bathtubs. Three of the bags stay at the natural acidity, the other six have carbon dioxide pumped inside to increase acidity to the levels projected under climate change.

鈥淭his experiment is a way to look at all interactions between the components of the food web, including some of the more complex biological interactions that happen in the real ocean,鈥� Murray said.

The acrylic domes are actually loose covers that prevent seagulls or other debris from landing in the tank.

The 91爆料 aquatic mesocosm was modeled after similar structures to study ocean acidification in , Norway, and , South Korea. Researchers from both countries are also involved in the experiments this spring at the Friday Harbor facility.

Korean scientists are interested in dimethyl sulfide, the chemical that helps give ocean air its characteristic smell. The concentrations of this gas may differ under climate change, and some scientists believe it plays a role in cloud formation.

“This year’s experiment has gone really smoothly so far, and I think we’re on track to have some interesting results,” Murray said.

###

For more information, contact Murray in Friday Harbor at 206-251-5220 or jmurray@uw.edu. Sampling will take place on the dock each day from 8:30-10 a.m. Visitors are welcome.